My new show:

I spent an incredible month at the Fish Factory in Iceland developing a new solo work with music. I will be performing in the Milwaukee Fringe in late August and the Charm City Fringe Festival in Baltimore in November. TBA other performances coming soon!

The play weaves together events in my personal family history – – turns and twists of US politics since the 80’s and imaginary alternative life trajectories. The fantastical story includes espionage, dark humor, friendship and second chances and is filled with live punk music and karaoke. Still in development!

At the border

Workshops and Happenings with The Living at the Mexican Border:

As the world watches the massive deportations and atrocities the US government continues to commit against immigrants, The Living Theatre headed to the frontlines. We organized a series of workshops and daily performance interventions with locals in Tijuana and San Ysidro, criss crossing the border in the summer heat; just a taste of what locals experience regularly. Thanks to our collaborators at Nett Nett and The Front Arte Cultura for hosting us and inviting us into your beautiful, strong communities. Our daily performance acts addressed femicide, border control, human connection and culminated with a homemade saint procession through the center of Tijuana's Zona Rosa neighborhood with gifts of love notes, humor, chocolates, and balloons.

Back to the occupied homeland

I traveled for three weeks with my mother to our unrecognized ancestral homeland in North Ossetia, occupied by Russia, at the southern border above Georgia. You can read more about my experience there in this post.

Athens

JAFRA:

I volunteered for two weeks at Jafra, a Palestinian organization that supports and offers free programming for all refugees. I taught theater to children, teens and adults and a special workshop for staff on how to teach theater and use it for healing. While I was there, the children's space, along with all of its programming, got shut down by the Municipality of Athens because of licensing, one of the ways the city is cracking down on NGO and volunteer-run centers for refugees. Please take action and get involved with this stellar organization that offers free Arabic, English, Math, computer access, drama, crafts, music and more.

REV. BILLY and THE CHURCH OF STOP SHOPPING:

The timing worked that I was able to I rejoin my NYC choir family for the Greek Festival. We had some hopping revivals in Saint Paul's Church and outdoor interventions in Syntagma Square, the site of the uprising 7 years ago, when I first came to Athens, and down through the center of the shopping/ tourist district. The Church of Stop Shopping launched the beginning of their global movement, Tourists Against Trump.

Words from the Rev:

#TOURISTSAGAINSTTRUMP . No meaningful change can take hold in the United States until we solve Consumerism. What is this society where 2/3's of our residents run their everyday lives through instructions they receive from the products that surround them? American life seems to be genetically engineered to resist the end of racism and sexism, or the Earth-hating of the big financial institutions. We have found that international tourists, the most depoliticized of the consumer sector - are roused to anger by the children-in-cages of this President. We also found in a high tourist and high refugee city, Athens Greece, that high-end consumers and immigrants could dance together. Will the consumers look up from their iPhones? We see them look up and discovering. And that's the wall coming down. #TOURISTSAGAINSTTRUMP

Vienna

I returned to Brunnenpassage to participate in the culmination of a month long photography workshop on Love, Loss and Longing. I offered a workshop in expressing these ideas through the body in ensemble creations and street performance.

Through waves of feeling overwhelmed by the constant state of crisis we face daily, I have decided to express my discontent with our government and prevailing systems of oppression: racism, sexism, white supremacy, heterosexism, ableism, capitalism and the human-caused climate change- through a series of performance art pieces.

I will continue to organize, protest, lead trainings as other ways of directly engaging but feel the need to engage artistically in a more immediate visceral form. It is a complete experiment and we will see what happens.

I will perform 45 pieces that will respond to what's happening in the world around me. Sometimes I will share videos, sometimes just photos, depending on what is possible. Sometimes it might go on for hours. Sometimes it might be only a couple minutes long. Sometimes it will be funny. Sometimes somber. Sometimes abstract, sometimes concrete. It is one stream of consciousness response from my heart.

The Living Theatre, the longest running experimental theater company formed in 1947, is about to embark on a three week journey across the United States of America for the Know Your Rites Tour.

As our country becomes increasingly disillusioned and mired in the election process, thousands of votes swallowed in the system, voices squashed, the least liked candidates ever running for office whose politics are based on hate speech, war mongering and corporate influence, mass murders prompted by bigotry and fear, innumerable refugees fleeing countries we have destabilized through war, we choose this time to travel through the middle of America to offer an alternative.

We offer a reawakening to one’s rights and rites. We will hold mass public rituals in the streets, at corporate headquarters, bank lobbies, fossil fuel sites of destruction. We will lead non-violent direct action trainings. We will perform an updated revival of one of the most significant shows in our repertoire, Seven Meditations on Political Sado-Masochism, a piece created by the company after being released from a prison in Brazil and focused on the torturous abuses by the Brazilian police.

The Living will travel to large metropolisesas well as small towns to engage with communities in theatrical interventions and rituals.

We take up the charge from our recently dearly departed co-founder, Judith Malina, an indefatigable source of radical artistry. In her name, we trek across the states offering a version of the beautiful non-violent anarchist revolution.

The Know Your Rites Tour begins on August 15, 2016 in New York City. We traveled to multiple cities along the way including:

8/15 Troy, NY

8/15 Buffalo, NY

8/16 Niagara Falls, NY

8/17 Flint, MI

8/17 Detroit, MI

8/18-8/19 Chicago, IL

8/20 Normal, IL

8/21 St. Louis, MO

8/22 Wichita, KS

8/23 Denver, CO

8/24-8/25 San Francisco, CA

8/26 Big Sur, CA

8/27 Los Angeles, CA

8/28 Las Vegas, NE

8/29 Phoenix, AZ

8/29 Tucson, AZ

8/30 Las Cruces, NM

8/31 Austin, TX

9/1 Houston, TX

9/2 New Orleans, LA

9/3 Birmingham, AL

9/4 Knoxville, TN

Performances:

-a performance of "Seven Meditations on Political Sadomasochism"

A visceral examination of the social contract between the governed and the government, Seven Meditations was written after Malina and members of the company were imprisoned-and some tortured-by the Médici dictatorship in Brazil in 1973. Considered one of the company's most significant pieces, the play explores Sacher-Masoch's Six Houses of Bondage: Love, Money, Property, State, War and Death, with a seventh meditation on Revolutionary Change.

-a reading of excerpts from "Full Moon Poems", Judith Malina's last published book or from any of her writings. Including a discussion on the practices of the Living Theatre with the company

- a ritualistic street performance that the company can create based on the specific needs/ interests of the local community. We would love to collaborate with you by responding to an immediate injustice and building a "happening" around that issue in a site-specific format

Workshops:

- a non-violent direct action training facilitated by members of the company that may include elements of our brand of ensemble movement techniques

- a Theater of the Oppressed workshop facilitated by members of the company

- Living Theatre ensemble theater exercises facilitated by the company.

The quick but packed tour to Europe was fantastyczny! (yeah, that's fantastic in Polish)

Euro Highlights:

- "Meetings with the Storytellers of the World" in Lublin, Poland

at Grodzka Gate Center-NN Theatre in really good company with some of the best storytellers of Europe. Packed festival!

-Bicycling from Krakow into the Moravian fields of Czech Republic, getting lost in forests, rolling hills, epic mountain views, constant rain followed by forgiving rainbow.

- Performed at Studio Alta and taught a physical storytelling workshop in Prague with the great Husam Abed, who performed an intimate puppet show about his family's life in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan.

-Taught a Site-Specific Theater for Social Change workshop in a cultural center in the heart of an immigrant hood of Vienna and caused some trouble out in the streets, gambling joints and bank lobbies with a bunch of new friends, through the generous help of the Riahi Brothers- creators of the film Everyday Rebellion.

- Had a couple glorious days to connect with friends in Berlin where spontaneous tango milongas, slack-line and Bauhaus abound. Went to a Gorki show of men brutally flinging one another around in a sand pit and was embraced by a sweaty sandy dancer mid show. Thanks, Melissa Chambers.

-*Extra: This trip was predominantly safe and I encountered little mishap, although

one night I did miss a train and spent the night in a construction site on the street,